R.I.P. William Miles

Documentarian William Miles, whose films include 1981’s I Remember Harlem and 1992’s Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II, died May 12 in New York, reports the NY Times. He was 82. In 1977 the Harlem native made his first documentary Men Of Bronze, about the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment sent to fight alongside the French in WWI, after himself serving in the National Guard. Liberators, co-directed with Nina Rosenblum, recounted the story of black soldiers who helped to liberate Nazi concentration camps and was nominated for an Oscar. He earned a CableACE nomination for 1993’s The Untold West and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

Deadline Team: In the interest of accuracy and balance, you should have included a mention of the controversy over the “Liberators” documentary. Its central claim, that members of the 761st Tank Battalion helped liberate Dachau and Buchenwald, was not true.

The film was pulled from circulation on PBS, reviewed for accuracy and found to be “seriously flawed,” with the producers’ research “at a level of paucity.” Co-producing station WNET in fact made changes in its production standards and practices to ensure that the slipshod approach of Miles and Rosenbaum did not get repeated in subsequent projects.

See the NYT article from 3.1.93 and numerous other articles about the controversy.

Documentary filmmaking and journalism both have (or should have) in common the goal of accuracy. Even when the truth is unpleasant, it should still be presented.